It seems incredible, but each year smokers here in France throw 30 billion butts on to this country’s sidewalks, parks and beaches. If one sets them out, they would go around our Mother Earth 22 times. As for Paris, half a million butts are thrown down on our sidewalks. If gathered together they would fill 25 of Paris’s public buses.

To get rid of the butts, Paris’s mayor Bertrand Delanoë will have 10,000 butt bins installed this month. He has furthermore asked France’s Minister of the Interior Manuel Valls to increase the current €35 ($45) fine for throwing a butt on to a sidewalk to €68 ($87). The fine’s the same if you allow your pooch to leave his previous night’s supper on a sidewalk.

As Monsieur François Dagnaud, of Paris’s city hall, told the Paris daily Le Parisien on October 31, in Paris alone 315 tons of cigarettes are smoked annually. “We reckon that the butts of half of these are thrown down on the ground,” he said.